About Me

Manu Sharma New Delhi / Gurgaon, India

Since mid 2006 I have grappled with climate change and what it means for us. As an activist and campaigner, I sought to learn and simultaneously, attempted to influence the issues surrounding it - in technology and policy advocacy. As a consultant, I studied markets and created portfolios in sustainability services and renewable energy investment.

After thousands of hours of research, tenacious activism, working up-close with NGOs as well as the industry, delivering about two dozen public talks, countless conferences, hundreds of online discussions, a few media appearances (including Reuters, News Television, and BBC radio), and continuous evolution of my own ideas about what ought to be done - I may have found some answers but the issue remains far from being addressed.

In the despair filled world of climate change the only place I've found real and lasting hope is in a beautiful vision inspired by "The Ringing Cedars of Russia" book series by Vladimir Megre. The books have triggered a transition movement in Russia and have profoundly influenced me. I am now working towards the vision.

Climate Revolution Initiative, an RTI campaign I founded and ran for a few years is now retired. I no longer deliver talks. I still consider myself an activist though and occasionally post on Green-India group started over nine years ago.

Older entries in this blog relate to my former occupation in user experience design; long time interest in business innovation, strategy, ethics; and venture creation.

Image on top of this bar is courtesy book covers of The Ringing Cedars series published under Croatian translation. (Source)

March 18, 2005

Ajax is receiving increasing attention in the mainstream media after it took the blogosphere by storm recently. All this has understandably put Macromedia on defensive as Ajax poses direct threat to its Flash and Flex platforms. They've now begun to play Microsoft (as in Windows Vs Linux) spreading misinformation about Ajax. Here's a what a senior executive told a Cnet journalist about the technology:

That's David Mendels, Executive VP and General Manager at Macromedia. Someone should inform Mr. Mendel that Adam Bosworth, the "rocket scientist" he credits for Gmail and Google Maps was hired July last year -- over three months after Gmail's public release and over two years after it was released internally at Google.

Also, that someone single-handedly built an Ajax tool for dictionary lookup on the lines of, and within 14 days of release of Google Suggest beta. I wish Cnet staff writer Paul Festa had gotten reactions to Mendel's statement from technical experts in the industry. Perhaps he should have contacted the people behind the term, who call it "practical for real-world applications".

UPDATE 25-Mar-2005: Macromedia Responds

David Mendels wrote in to clarify that he also said many more things to the Cnet journalist and by quoting just one sentence, the journalist perhaps misrepresented his intent. Complete quote:

"Paul Festa quoted one sentence from me out of an hour conversation, so it may be a bit unfair to accuse me of spreading misinformation. Adam Bosworth is just one person and I wasn't suggesting he built gmail but rather that Google has the resources to do things that are *relatively* less practical for many folks."

Fair enough. A good journalist would have quoted the essence of the long interview in that one sentence, but knowing how clueless journalists can be when it comes to technology, I can believe that David was perhaps misquoted.

(Note to any journalist reading this: you don't go to an analyst to corroborate a technology story, you go to a geek.)

David Mendels added that Macromedia has been promoting Asynchronous Javascript and HTML for years. He wrote: "for many uses Flash (or for large complex applications, Flex) is a better way to do AJAX." While this is arguable (see links below), I completely agree when he says, "to each their own--these are all tools for the developer community to choose among. [...] It doesn't have to be one vs the other. Each has strengths and weaknesses and you should look at these choices based on your specific application. And they can be used together as well."

JD: "Google has indeed made a lot of top-flight hires in JavaScript/DOM work, and I don't think the emphasis was actually "Adam Bosworth wrote that app"."

That may be true but Ajax certainly came across in the article as "rocket science" that Google can afford to work on and others cannot. David's quote was prominently highlighted on the second page of the article.

JD: "What we really could use in this discussion is some analysis of the actual costs (in development, testing, and maintenance) of writing across multiple engines. This would be useful, agreed...?"

Absolutely, if such an objective analysis is indeed possible. But the time to write code also depends(perhaps more so) on the skill of people writing it than the platform it is written on. How do you get two teams that have the same level of competence in each technology (and how'd you measure that)? Even if you do achieve that seemingly insurmountable hurdle, you'd need to decide on a project that doesn't favor a particular platform and is representative of actual work that's being done.

If such a study is indeed carried out, I hope it is not commissioned by Macromedia. I won't expect any study to be credible that's conducted by a company, which might stand to gain from publishing its results. The Flash player statistics page on Macromedia website, for example, proudly proclaims "Macromedia Flash content reaches 98.2% of Internet viewers." It's only when you look at the version penetration breakdown on another page do you realise that the quoted figure is for Flash version 2 while the latest version 7 player reaches only 83% of internet viewers in US. The same study inexplicably puts the number of internet users with Windows Media Player at a mere 42% when we know that about 90% of internet users are on a Windows OS.